The Last Season

  Smith was known for having a discerning eye for talent and, like his Mafia brethren, didn’t settle for mediocrity in any of the positions he supervised. He was always on the lookout for applicants who were likely to continue on as permanent rangers. The standard question he asked himself was: “Is this person capable and of the right mindset to eventually rise to the occasion and take over my position? Is this person a lifer in the Park Service?” If the answer was yes, he’d pull the application from the stack.

  In 1974, the stack was massive. There weren’t many winter jobs available in Yosemite, so the summer seasonals who wanted to stick around scrambled for them, fluffing their résumés with all conceivable qualifications. At the time everybody wanted to be a ranger, and some jobs in Yosemite had more than 1,000 applicants. It was easy to find parking lot attendants, chairlift operators, concession and food service workers. It was even easy to find alpine rangers, who acted as ski patrol on the groomed slopes of Badger Pass. But Nordic, or cross-country, skiing—despite a centuries-old history—hadn’t taken off in the United States to the degree of alpine, or downhill, skiing, so few applicants possessed the winter survival and mountaineering skills required for the job.

  Smith had to fill two positions, and about a dozen applicants made the “maybe” stack. After interviewing and skiing with them, Smith settled on Joe Evans, a seasonal ranger in his midtwenties who seemed to fit the mold of the new breed of ranger Smith was looking for. Evans was gung ho. He had aspirations for a career with the NPS, was an excellent skier, loved recreating in the outdoors, and displayed the right amount of adrenaline to do the job. “You could sense Joe was excited about the position,” remembers Smith. “He ended up being the type of guy who would be waiting to join a search-and-rescue operation before I’d even heard there was a missing person.”

  The other ranger wasn’t such an easy decision. Granted, Randy, at 32, could parallel-ski downhill on his three-pin cross-country skis better than most of his alpine patrolmen, he was already considered a veteran backcountry summer ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, he had climbed in the Himalayas, he had been skiing the area he’d be patrolling since he was a teenager, and, offsetting Evans, “Randy seemed remarkably calm,” says Smith. “But he wasn’t a ‘company man.’ He was living what we called back then an ‘alternative lifestyle.’ Not into drugs or anything like that—he was completely content chasing the seasons, being a seasonal backcountry ranger winter and summer and taking photos for his aspiring photography career. He also asked if I minded if he kept his camera with him and took photos on his patrols.”

  Despite his reservations, Smith could not, in good conscience, hire a ranger who was more career-oriented but had lesser mountain skills than Randy.

  The Nordic uniform of the time was a black wool turtleneck under a gray shirt and woolen green knickers fashioned from a pair of long pants. So that was the image of Randy and Evans striding across the frozen Yosemite tundra toward Glacier Point or Dewey Point. When they came across a skier with a “flat tire”—a broken ski binding or ski tip—they’d fix it. If someone had twisted a knee in a tree well, they’d make the skier comfortable with a wool blanket they carried in their packs and pull him or her out of the mountains on a sled. And if there was a situation in the farther reaches of the park, they were the first called to be helicoptered in, because, as Smith explains, “they were the two rangers in the park who could survive out there if the helicopter couldn’t make it back out because of weather.”

  On one occasion, Randy and Evans were helicoptered into the backcountry near Triple Divide Peak. A plane had crashed, it was windy, snow squalls were settling in over the higher peaks, and just as they hopped down into the swirling snow, the helicopter took off with their packs still inside. The two rangers looked at each other, then at the gray mountain tempest that was moving in, and said, “Oh shit.” They had no survival gear. Fortunately, the helicopter was able to make it back through the clouds to pick them up after the operation.

  During his tenure as a Yosemite Nordic ranger, Randy was called to his first recovery, another plane crash. He was one of the rangers charged with extricating the bodies from the wreckage—a grisly task in any season, but particularly haunting against the cold and snowy landscape of winter.

  Randy took that first recovery in stride, though he admitted to Judi that it was the most difficult thing he’d done as a ranger. “The first one or two recoveries are the toughest,” says Evans. “But the job had to be done, and if it wasn’t a child or other tragic incident, gallows humor usually applied.” Phrases like “Well, shit happens” and “By Gawd, every American has the right to die in their national park!” were lobbed back and forth. There was no post-incident counseling. “Back then, we did the job and went and had a few beers,” Evans says. “In fact, it was not uncommon to have a few beers at the SAR cache when repackaging ropes and gear after the incident. Of course, Randy, being a bit older and in a serious relationship with Judi, was not always part of the ‘faster crowd’ of rangers at the time. Randy was more philosophical about life than most.”

  But if you got a little wine or beer in him, you couldn’t get him to stop talking. Randy would crack Evans up with his sardonic sense of humor in one sentence and ground him in the next. “He reminded me to appreciate life and the wonders of the natural world,” says Evans—and he wasn’t afraid to explore the mountains in the winter, which “wasn’t being done much back then.” That winter, Randy recruited Evans and their friend Howard Weamer to ski from Yosemite to Mammoth. Nobody, to their knowledge, had taken the route they pieced together on a map, which began at Ostrander Lake and continued along the Merced Pass ridge to Banner Peak (which they climbed). On the fifth day of the trip, they made it to Mammoth. “With Randy and Howard, I am sure I came close to dying a couple of times by skiing across too steep or unstable snow,” says Evans. “The classic ‘whump’ of snow settling still rings in my ears as I reflect on that trip. A splendid time, though, and we were blessed with perfect weather.”

  ON JUNE 14, 1975, Randy was helicoptered to Crabtree Meadow with a season’s worth of supplies, another blank journal, and a copy of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. He also carried with him a mild degree of hope. During the winter he’d written a few more stories, but he still felt strongest about the one inspired by his trip to the Four Corners Monument with Judi almost two years earlier. Sensing that it was a timeless piece, he’d rolled a sheet of paper into his father’s typewriter and pounded out a new version of the story titled “Four Corners—A Prelude.” He sent it off to National Parks & Conservation Magazine after having previous versions rejected by six other magazines. He also sent it to Wallace Stegner, with whom he’d been embarrassed to correspond because he still had not gotten any of his stories published after nearly three years of trying. He could have wallpapered his room with rejection slips and letters.

  Before he went into the mountains for the summer, Randy asked his parents to watch for any response from Stegner or the magazine. He instructed them to have their mail forwarded to Sedona, Arizona, a growing artist community where Dana and Esther were overseeing the construction of the home they intended to retire in. Randy made it clear that if they heard anything, regardless whether it was bad or good, they should foward the mail to him in the backcountry or contact the park dispatcher, who could relay a message.

  By season’s end, he had hiked nearly 800 miles, spread the gospel to more than 1,400 people, evacuated a dozen individuals for medical problems—and heard not a single word from his parents.

  Even without that letdown, leaving the mountains had always carried with it depression. By all accounts, Randy wasn’t programmed for civilization. Something in his being short-circuited the minute he left the Sierra, disallowing total happiness. The first few days were always the worst, but Judi was there to ease the transition. Having recently graduated from California State University at San Jose with a degree in art history, she met him at Ash Mountain and drove with h
im north through the park, in the shadows of the Giant Forest. On the curving mountain road, Judi filled him in on her job hunt in San Francisco. Randy caught her up to date on the newly implemented wilderness-permit trail-quota system, which he wasn’t entirely in favor of. He liked the idea of quotas—limiting the number of people allowed on a certain trail could only be good for the wilderness—but forcing visitors to provide an itinerary on a permit contradicted his idea of a wilderness experience, which, in his words, should be “impulsive and subject to change at the whim of the traveler.” He understood the reason: to tally visitors and to track down overdue hikers who might be lost or injured. Still, he didn’t like it.

  Judi, though thrilled to be reunited with her man, was concerned that he wasn’t even flinching at her mention of getting a job in San Francisco, a city, a place he would never consider living in. What, then, of their relationship? They loved their time together, but they were also comfortable apart, and comfortable “going with the flow” from season to season, year after year. And that, she worried, might become a habit she would eventually regret.

  They got into Yosemite after dark—ten days past the full moon but it was still bright enough to highlight the granite walls rimming the valley. The valley always took Judi’s breath away. “What a place to call home,” she said as they entered Randy’s parents’ house.

  Dana was still awake after having presented his regularly scheduled photography slide show to a crowd of 110 at the Ahwahnee Hotel. Life was good for the self-taught photographer and botanist, who had come to be one of Yosemite’s resident celebrities.

  At the Curry Company, he had worked his way up from managing the accounting office to managing the reservations department, where he was then promoted to director of reservations and, eventually, director of guest activities. The job was at first administrative, but soon Dana was using his knowledge of the seasons, wildlife, and natural world to act as a sort of public relations representative. When Randy left for the Peace Corps in 1967, Dana was 57 years old. He had been aiming for 60 as a good time to retire to Sedona.

  His superiors, however, didn’t want to see him leave, and in 1968 they created for him a unique assignment, previously untried by any national park concessionaire. Combining two of his passions, photography and nature walks, with his natural ability as an orator, Dana led camera walks for park visitors. The camera walks became one of the park’s most popular attractions, and he was so enamored with the job, he extended his retirement to 1974, and then another year to 1975. On this night, he let Judi and Randy know that he had decided to extend his retirement again, to 1979. He felt he owed it to the public.

  Letters to the Park Service praised Dana’s skills. “Among [the park’s] fine human resources, there is one very special man, Mr. Dana C. Morgenson, naturalist, guide, lecturer, photographer, and author. [Dana wrote and provided the photography for two books in the 1970s: Yosemite Wildflower Trails and The Four Seasons of Yosemite.] To take a morning walk with the sensitive, artistic, knowledgeable, kindly human being, enhances our appreciation of the Park’s loveliness.”

  Another park visitor wrote: “Took the first walk [with Dana] on a Wednesday and didn’t miss one the rest of the week. His patience was inexhaustible, his knowledge of the Park and its history, incredible. The quiet trails along the Merced, with its shadowed pools held us spellbound. Thanks to Mr. Morgenson, the Park really means something to us. The manner in which he described an incident in history for a particular view brings it to life. I noted with interest that all ages seem to derive the same delight that captivated us. A trip to Yosemite without a hike with Dana is but half a trip!”

  His father’s success motivated Randy: If you worked hard, believed in what you did, and stayed the course, then success and recognition would follow.

  Randy and Judi retired upstairs to his old bedroom and, as was customary after the season, he pulled from the dresser drawer a stack of mail that his parents had collected. Toward the bottom was a letter from National Parks & Conservation Magazine, postmarked June 6, and another from Wallace Stegner, postmarked September 23.

  The magazine had accepted his story—for the August issue. Now, in October, the story was more than two months late. Stegner had told him that once he got beyond publishing that first article, credibility would help carry him through to the next, building momentum for his writing career.

  Stegner’s letter was bittersweet.

  Dear Randy,

  I enjoyed your piece on Four Corners, and am surprised that you haven’t placed it somewhere—though perhaps the contrast between then and now is a sort of inevitable subject, and has been done several times. I myself did a similar sort of piece on Glen Canyon as river and Glen Canyon as lake, and I remember most vividly the kind of contrast you speak of in your piece.

  But whatever luck your piece has had, I’m moved by your feeling for the untouched country, the sand and the ledges and the sparse millet and the air, and the distances. Keep at it, it’ll jell one of these days. And sometime go up on the Aquarius above Torrey, and climb to the very rim, at above 11,000 feet, and look off eastward. If the smog…hasn’t gummed it all up, and it probably has, you can see the San Juan Mountains clear over in Colorado, and a couple of hundred miles. I don’t know anywhere on Earth where you can see that far, except that view from that high rim across that eroded desert to another high rim. But I guess I wouldn’t go there now unless after a cleansing rain or a windstorm…

  Yours,

  Wallace Stegner

  Judi knew Randy was crushed. “He’d worked so hard on that story,” she says. “It was as perfect as he could have gotten it.” He lay in bed, fuming at his parents. It tortured him to think that all that was needed was his signature to okay the $50 fee the magazine had offered to pay for his story.

  Being the good son who rarely raised his voice in anger to his father and never to his mother, he didn’t let on to his parents the full extent of the blow. He followed up with the magazine, but it was too late. They’d covered the Southwest fully in that issue and wouldn’t be publishing stories on that region for a number of years.

  JUDI RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO a week later to continue her job hunt. She hadn’t voiced her concerns over the relationship with Randy, but she had shared them with her roommate, Gail, who, since the seventh grade, had been her closest friend.

  Randy called Judi shortly after she arrived. The conversation barely got started before Judi was talking about the drive back and forth from the city to Yosemite; how she could and would continue to do it, but that she needed something more concrete than the good times she and Randy shared. She could barely believe her own ears when she heard herself use the word “married” in a shit-or-get-off-the-pot tone.

  She was met with momentary silence, then Randy calmly said, “Okay—then let’s get married.” Judi and Randy had proven themselves a good match: neither of them wanted children; they shared similar philosophical and political views; they were content apart and happy together. Holding her hand over the phone, she told Gail quietly, “He just proposed. What should I do?”

  Gail—who liked Randy and, more important, liked Randy with her friend—nodded her approval.

  On November 22, 1975, Judi and Randy were married by a justice of the peace in a short, nonreligious wedding. The backdrop to their vows were Half Dome and the golden-grassed Ahwahnee Meadow, where Randy had played as a youth.

  “This was the wedding day for Judi and Randy,” wrote Dana in his diary. “The entire company walked out toward the sunny meadow in front of our house for the ceremony, which took about ten minutes. It was quite nicely done and a pleasure to participate in and see. Judi looked very pretty in her wedding gown, while Randy too was handsome in his blue leisure suit. Then everyone returned to the superb buffet Roy and Dottie Douglas had prepared and with plenty of champagne the occasion was a properly gay one.”

  Dana and Esther treated the couple to a honeymoon in the Gold Country, north of Yosemite. Randy and
Judi drove up Highway 49, exploring the towns born from the California gold rush and staying in the romantic bed-and-breakfasts that caught their eye along the way.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PAID IN SUNSETS

  Carried away a pack full of the leavings of Swinus Americanus. Slobs, creating their own bad karma, give me the chance to do Earth a good turn. Perhaps blessed stormy weather, and succession of rangers, and god will have the joint looking natural in 10,000 years or so.

  —Randy Morgenson, location and date unknown

  I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.

  —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

  ALDEN NASH TRANSFERRED to Sequoia and Kings Canyon from Yellowstone during the winter of 1975. As the new Sierra district ranger in charge of most of the backcountry rangers, Nash spearheaded a movement that helped nudge the parks’ policy out of the dark ages.

  For decades, the recruitment of backcountry rangers had been what some considered both chauvinistic and militaristic. Nash, the father of two daughters, couldn’t see “any reason whatsoever” why a young woman could not do the job. Before Nash, a backcountry ranger had a better chance of being hired if he was a “clean-shaven white boy without a girlfriend,” a statement Nash follows with “I’ll deny that in court.”

  Nash changed policy at Sequoia and Kings Canyon abruptly when he hired the parks’ first female backcountry ranger, Cynthia Leisz, who had been working in the frontcountry and was capable and keen to break the mold.